Hinterland: America's New Landscape of Class and Conflict

Description

Over the last forty years, the landscape of the United States has been fundamentally transformed. It is partially visible in the ascendance of glittering, coastal hubs for finance, infotech and the so-called `creative class'. But this is only the tip of an economic iceberg, the bulk of which lies in the darkness of the declining heartland or on the dimly lit fringe of sprawling cities. This is America's Hinterland, populated by towering grain-threshing machines and hunched farmworkers, where labourers drawn from every corner of the world crowd into factories and `fulfilment centres'. Driven by an ever-expanding crisis, America's class structure is recomposing itself in new geographies of race, poverty and production. Drawing on his direct experience of recent popular unrest, Phil A. Neel provides a close-up view of this landscape in all its grim but captivating detail, and tells the intimate story of a life lived within America's hinterland.

Phil A. Neel was raised in a mobile home in the Siskiyou Mountains, on the border of California and Oregon. He writes regularly on diverse topics and currently lives in Seattle.

`Imagine Patrick Leigh Fermor and Karl Marx on a road trip through the hubs and corridors of rust-belt America . . . Ambitious, polemical, brilliant.' - Arlie Hochschild, author of Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right; `Phil A. Neel's dazzling journeys through the burned-over landscapes of end-time capitalism - the despoiled remnants of rural America, the exfoliating zones of suburban poverty - compel us to rethink what class conflict looks like not only in America, but around the world.'- Steve Fraser, author of The Age of Acquiescence: The Life and Death of American Resistance to Organized Wealth and Power